Samsung says Tizen is a significant investment, but won’t launch any smartphones or TVs based on it this year

Samsung’s Tizen was born in 2011, when the South Korean company joined forces with Intel, bringing together elements from platforms like LiMo, MeeGo and Bada. Now, two years later, we’ve yet to see the first commercially-available Tizen smartphone. This was supposed to arrive in early 2013, but won’t be launched until next year after all.

Even so, Tizen doesn’t seem to be dead, as recently speculated. On the contrary. Today, Kim Hyun-seok, who is leading Samsung Electronics’ visual display unit, declared that Tizen is a “significant investment.” The Samsung official also said that there’s been “much progress in the [first] Tizen TV”, but a smartphone running the new OS will be released before it.

It’s not clear if the first Tizen smartphone to hit shelves will be the GT-I8800 / GT-I8805 (codenamed Redwood), or a completely new device. In any case, we shouldn’t expect it to be widely available, and neither to offer the latest high-end specs – as Samsung is sticking with Android for its flagship devices.

Samsung aside, Fujitsu and NEC said that they’d also launch Tizen handsets in 2014. However, NEC is no longer interested in the smartphone business, so that leaves only Fujitsu to try and make something noteworthy.